


When One Door Closes...

by lonelyspaghetti



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, F/M, Foreign Language, Gen, Headcanon galore, Humor, Modern Girl in Thedas, The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 07:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11031741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyspaghetti/pseuds/lonelyspaghetti
Summary: ...a rift opens. On the brink of tragedy, one girl finds herself within the walls of Skyhold, with no idea how she got there and no idea how to get back. Take nothing seriously.





	When One Door Closes...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my effort to keep myself sane while I work on my actual story, The Moments in Between. This is set within that story, but is by no means necessary to read in order to understand this. It's still a good story, though. 
> 
> Translation notes are in the end notes.

“She’s been sleeping for hours.”

“You sure she’s not actually dead?”

“Bags in her hands, it’s going to rain soon, make the scones for Erik—”

“Are those her thoughts, Cole?”

“Thunder cracks overhead, a wrong step, a blaring horn, then… nothing.”

* * *

She’s not in as much pain as she should be, but she also has no idea how much pain she should be in. _What was I doing,_ she wonders to herself, _to find myself in a dungeon?_

At least she _thinks_ it’s a dungeon (it’s 2017 why would I be in a dungeon), but she can’t be too sure. Her wrists are shackled together and her mouth tastes like sweat and… not quite vomit, and not blood, but something thicker and metallic.

_Where’s my shit?_

“Hey!” she yells beyond her cell bars, but it comes out as more of a croak. She feels hungover. Is she hungover? Hair falls into her eyes as she wriggles onto her knees, and she momentarily forgets that she’s shackled to the floor and falls onto her side. _How fucking undignified._

She rolls onto her back and scoots until she can kick against the iron bars of her cell with the leg that isn’t chained. How dangerous must she be if they’ve locked her up, chained her wrists, _and_ shackled her leg? She’s almost flattered, but she also _really_ needs to pee.

In the distance, a door opens and shuts, and she can make out several pairs of feet descending what sounds like a stone stairway. Stay cool, she tells herself, don’t act too interested.

Except she bursts out laughing when the first of her visitors (or perhaps captors) comes into view, wearing an identical costume of a character from a video game she is perhaps a little too obsessed with. This displeases the woman, complete with ginger bob and icy blue eyes, as she scowls at her and kicks the cell with a steel-toed boot. Leliana is not happy, it would seem, and so the girl, spooked, swallows her panicked laughter.

Two more people come into focus and she pales considerably, as one is dressed in perfect likeness of one Cullen Rutherford, with a very realistic scar over his lip and very, very fluffy surcoat. _Oh man I wanna take a nap in it,_ the part of her brain not concerned with surviving whispers, and she purses her lips to keep from laughing at herself. The third, shorter than both by nearly a head, looks far too similar to her favorite Inquisitor, and so the girl does the only reasonable thing she could do in such a situation:

She faints.

 

 

And then awakens once more, several moments later, tied to a chair with water splashed in her face.

“Rude,” she mutters, sputtering. “Rude and unnecessary.” The woman dressed as Leliana says something she can’t quite understand, but that sounds almost like English and a little like German.

“I’m sorry?” she says, swiveling her head between the three costumed people. She wants to ask them how long it took to perfect them, because _man,_ they’re good, and she’s not willing to accept a reality in which these people are real. _Nope, not today, please let me go._

The brunette in the leather jacket frowns and leans down to her, looking at her face closely with unsettling green eyes—unsettling because they are the exact shade she’d created for her Inquisitor, spent hours mixing until they were precisely the shade of sage that she was after. The woman speaks, her voice low and soft, using the same language that is _so close_ to English that it drives the girl insane.

“I—I don’t know what you’re saying,” she says desperately, wriggling in the chair. “I could try… another language, maybe?” The woman frowns, looks up at the man dressed and scowling exactly like Cullen, and straightens. They exchange words and he shrugs. The girl clears her throat.

“Ich weiß nicht was ihr sagt, aber ich kann ein andere Sprache sprechen.”

The man dressed as Cullen frowns instantly, his eyes narrowing in what she hopes is recognition. He addresses her in the most soul-meltingly beautiful German voice she’s ever heard, “Sie sprechen Fereldisch?”

“Ferel…” she shakes her head, that sounds _way too close_ to Fereldan, and how far are these people willing to go for a joke? But she presses on. “Nein, das ist Deutsch, wir sprechen Deutsch. Bitte, ich verstehe nur Deutsch und Englisch.” She pauses. “Und ein bisschen Französisch.”

“Französisch?” he repeats carefully, as if he’d never heard the word before, and she sighs.

“Je m’appelle Camille. Je parle un peu français.”

The green-eyed woman brightens. “Vous parlez Orlesian!” to which Camille frantically shakes her head.

The man turns to the other women and explains something in their common tongue, which Camille is beginning to suspect is actually… Common. She hears him carefully pronounce the German words for languages she’d explained.

If she really has fallen into one of her favorite tropes of all time, she at least has one headcanon correct: Fereldans are totally German.

The woman dressed as Leliana says something that the woman who looks entirely too much like Daphne Trevelyan dislikes, as she frowns and vehemently shakes her head. She points at Cullen (she might as well accept it, mightn’t she?) and then points at her, and Camille _really_ doesn’t like the fact that people are talking about her in front of her in a language she does not understand. They seem engrossed in their argument, probably over what to do with her, a strange girl who probably fell from a rift, as these things go, and speaks precisely one and a third of their languages, but not the language that everyone in Thedas—if it really is Thedas and not some horrible joke—should be able to speak.

“Wo bin ich?” Camille asks in her smallest, most pathetic sounding voice, and she watches Cullen’s eyes to see if they soften even an inch. Something in his face twitches, but he finally addresses her.

“Wir können das nicht sagen, weil wir keine Ahnung wen Sie sind wissen.” His voice is too pretty. He could read Faust to her and she’d be okay with dying today.

She sighs, expecting as much, and closes her eyes briefly. “Ich bin niemanden. Ich weiß nicht wie ich hierher gekommen bin, oder warum, oder wann.”

“Das ist… ein Problem.”

She snorts. “So ich gesagt habe, mein Name ist Camille. Ich bin dreiunzwansig Jahre alt. Ich bin… Studentin. Ich bin kein Krieger oder…” and she forgets how the fuck to say Mage, because that word doesn’t _exist_ in modern settings, so she settles on magician, “Magierin?”

It seems to work, as he murmurs something to the other women and moves behind her to untie the ropes that bind her to the chair. As he works the knots his fingers slip and make contact with the skin over her wrists, and both yelp as an electric current jolts through them, sending Cullen rolling into the ground as Camille falls sideways out of her chair and crashing onto the ground, her ropes still tangled loosely about her. Both Leliana and the Inquisitor have blades pointed at her throat.

“She lied,” Leliana seethes. “She is a mage. Restrain her.”

“I’m not a mage!” Camille cries desperately, throwing her forearms over her face defensively, not realizing that they could understand each other.

“She also lied about not being able to speak Common,” the Inquisitor mumbles, stepping over her and wrenching a hand away from her face.

“I swear, I couldn’t understand you until C—” she almost slips, almost says Cullen’s name, who has righted himself and is now looking at her from the other side of his longsword— “until he started untying me. Something shocked me and I could understand you, I _promise,”_ she insists.

“She’s telling the truth,” another voice intones, and all four people turn their heads to find Cole standing in the corner staring intently at the girl on the ground. “Scared and screeching, she’s not supposed to die yet, I need to make him scones…”

A vision swims in front of Camille’s eyes, seemingly triggered by his words:

 _She’s walking back to her car, hands laden with shopping bags full of baking supplies. Her face is grimy, dried sweat from her earlier gym session, key fob in her mouth as she tries to finagle a few fingers free. The sky is getting dark—she’d seen a low pressure system looming around Oklahoma, and it must be catching up, but this bag won’t untwist from her wrist and when she lifts it an inch, it snaps because_ of course it does _and her bottle of heavy cream rolls into the street, the bag of cinnamon chips plops to her feet, and her sack of flour cracks open and coats her car door in a white powder. She sighs, chants “this is the worst day of my life,” and unlocks her car, leaves the door open and the groceries on the seat as she steps into the street to chase her bottle of cream, and a car flies around the corner, both driver and pedestrian unaware of each other, and the last thing she remembers is her boyfriend’s text message “there better be scones when I get there or im breakin up wit u_ _❤_ _❤_ _❤ “ before she’s pinned between her car door and the front fender of this stranger’s truck._

_Ironically, it’s a Dodge._

Her head falls back with a sigh and tears fill her eyes. “I think I’m dead,” she whispers to the stone ceiling, Daphne Trevelyan’s confused face looming in the corner of his eyes.

“Commander, are you alright?” Leliana asks, and Daphne and Camille turn to find him bracing himself on the chair she’d been tied to, gloves straining over tight knuckles, fury and dismay in his eyes.

“You’re in my head,” he snarls at her, letting a tear fall. If he saw that happen as she did, she wonders if he also must have felt everything she felt. “You _lied._ You planted that vision—”

“She’s not a mage,” Cole insists, coming forward and helping Camille sit up. She gives him a watery smile and rubs out her wrist.

“What vision?” Daphne asks, and Camille looks at Cullen.

“You watched me die,” she says. “I was at my car, right? My groceries fell and I reached to get something and someone hit me with his truck?”

“Car? Truck?” Daphne asks, bewildered, sinking into the chair.

“Those… brightly colored carriages, you call them… cars?”

“Yeah, short for carriage,” she says, bewildered that they’re having a vocabulary lesson whilst she’s trying to come to terms with the fact that she’s dead and her afterlife is a video game canon she’d created herself.

“Cullen saw all of that?”

“I… Are you a spirit like Cole?” Leliana asks, and Camille looks at Cole. He blinks at her, slow and sad, neither confirming nor denying the question. All he’s been able to prove is that she is neither a mage nor a liar, and she’s at least thankful for that.

“I don’t know. I think… I have an idea of what’s going on, but I need to know where we are and how far you all have progressed.”

“Progressed?”

Camille sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, massages her tear ducts into submission, and lets her hand fall onto her thigh. She’s still wearing the leggings she must have been wearing when she…

Did she die?

* * *

They’ve migrated to the Inquisitor’s chambers, which are much larger in real life and include more stairs that Camille ever thought she’d have to deal with… and she’s toured castles before. Does everyone in Thedas have massive calves?

They’re joined by Josephine, who (as usual, it would seem) has brought her ledgerboard with her and is taking notes.

“A game.”

“Yep.”

“So you… you play as us—” Josephine starts, but Camille makes a noise in her throat, silencing her.

“Just the Inquisitor… at least in this one.”

“There’s more than one?”

“There’s one about the Blight, which… who’s the Hero of Ferelden?”

“Selene Surana… she’s—”

“Missing? Figured. There’s one about her, and one about the Champion of Kirkwall, which, if I’m not mistaken, would be an archer named Marian Hawke? Is she… missing?”

“Hawke is resting here before she leaves to scout west,” Daphne supplies, much to Leliana’s irritation. “So you’re… me?”

“I guide your story and try to make the decisions you’d make according to who you are as a person.”

Daphne flushes. “Who… who I am.” She squirms in her seat, a characteristic that Camille had given her, herself. It makes her uncomfortable.

“Yeah, like… who you let join you, how you make your decisions. For example, did you side with the mages or the templars to close the Breach?”

“The mages,” she says without hesitation, leaning into Camille’s space. Camille frowns.

“Um. Do you… have an older sister who’s also a mage?”

Daphne stiffens. “Ye-es.”

Camille smirks a little. She’s entered the timeline she created herself, which kind of makes her God, but she has no idea how far she is, because the last thing she’d written was immediately following Daphne closing the breach.

_This is too meta. I need a nap._

“Is my sister in the game?” Daphne presses. Camille decides lying is her best option; telling the most powerful person in Thedas that she made up her entire life is probably not within her best interest, at least while she works out whether or not she’s actually dead.

“She’s mentioned. Is she here?”

“She’s in Crestwood.”

Oh. Why? “Why?”

“I don’t think I need to tell you. Does it not happen in this… game?”

“No. I guess more happens beyond what I get to see and experience.” Especially considering that this person doesn’t exist in the game. Neither does Daphne’s anxiety, which is a projection of her own problems. _Neat. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it._

“Why do you have a connection with Cullen?” Daphne asks, interrupting her internal spiral.

Cullen leans back into the sofa, glowering at her.

“My guess is that it’s because he touched me.”

“I beg your pardon?” he sputters, and Camille rolls her eyes.

“No, when you went to untie me. Remember? We both got shocked and I could suddenly understand what you were saying?”

Daphne hums. “That makes sense… I suppose.”

“It’s my only theory that works. Hey, did I fall out of a rift?” The thought, like many others, immediately pops into her head and she finds herself asking the question before she can filter herself.

“Yes. Why?”

 _Because that's how these stories usually go,_ she thinks. “Thought I might have.”

Daphne and Cullen exchange a look before he finally speaks. “Does that happen in the game?”

“No, but… it’s the only thing that makes sense.” To explain fanfiction to them would be far too much over-stimulation for all parties involved, and this much meta is making her head hurt. She _really_ needs a nap. “Am I still in trouble?”

“No,” Daphne says rather decisively, and Cullen gives her and the other advisors a sharp look.

“Inquisitor,” Josephine hedges, but Daphne shakes her head.

“I trust you.”

“Why?”

“You should know the answer to that yourself,” she says, smiling. “If you’ve _played_ as me as much as you say you have.”

“Heh. You right, you right,” Camille says, wincing as she remembers her modern colloquialisms. She’s going to have to change her vernacular if this is really her afterlife. "Could I maybe get some new clothes? And a nap?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation notes: This is the only time a foreign language will be used, I promise! Translations occur in order of speech.  
> “I don’t know what you’re saying, but I can speak another language.”  
> “You speak Fereldan?”  
> “Ferel-no, this is German, we’re speaking German. Please, I only understand German and English. And a bit of French.”  
> “My name is Camille. I speak a bit of French.”  
> “You speak Orlesian!”  
> “Where am I?”  
> “We can’t tell you that, because we have no idea who you are.”  
> “I am nobody. I don’t know how I got here, or why, or when.”  
> “That is... a problem.”  
> “Like I said, my name is Camille. I’m twenty-three years old. I am... a student. I’m not a warrior or a mage.”
> 
> If you want to come tell me I've made a grave mistake in writing this or perhaps ask me why I insist that Fereldans would be German, [come on over to tumblr](http://lonely-spaghetti.tumblr.com), where you'll find a few drabbles and a LOT of shit posts.


End file.
